Zombie Fud

The Memory Program

This comprehensive Memory Program has three major steps, each involving several components:
Read More …

Smart Spending to get the Eyeglasses

Spending some money in the internet would need some “smart” strategies. We must be able to get the perfect stuff in the perfect site to make sure that we use the money smartly. We must to find the perfect online store that could give us what we need.

If you need the eyeglasses, it would be strongly recommended for you to visit the Zennioptical.com. This is one of the ultimate online optical that could give you some awesome services. One of the best services is that they have the cheap $ 8 Rx eyeglasses .

Some people said that finally; I found My favorite high fashion eyeglasses in this site. If you wish to be the smart spender, get the How You Can Start Spending Smart tips in the Cbn.com.

DHEA: Clinical Impact on Memory

Clinically, some patients with lupus who take DHEA have reported improved mood and less generalized pain. DHEA has also been administered to people with a variety of age-related maladies, including memory loss. A major limitation is that most studies to date have involved only a handful of subjects.
Read More …

Hack 62. The Broken Escalator Phenomenon: When Autopilot Takes Over

Your conscious experience of the world and control over your body both feel instantaneousbut they’re not.

Lengthy delays in sensory feedback and in the commands that are sent to your muscles mean that what you see now happened a few moments ago and what you’re doing now you planned back then. To get around the problem caused by these delays in neural transmission, your brain is active and constructive in its interactions with the outside world, endlessly anticipating what’s going to happen next and planning movements to respond appropriately.

Most of the time this works well, but sometimes your brain can anticipate inappropriately, and the mismatch between what your brain thought was going to happen and what it actually encounters can lead to some strange sensations.

6.2.1. In Action
One such sensation can be felt when you walk onto a broken escalator. You know it’s broken but your brain’s autopilot takes over regardless, inappropriately adjusting your posture and gait as if the escalator were moving. This has been dubbed the broken escalator phenomenon.1 Normally, the sensory consequences of these postural adjustments are canceled out by the escalator’s motion, but when it’s broken, they lead to some self-induced sensations that your brain simply wasn’t expecting. Your brain normally cancels out the sensory consequences of its own actions [Hack #65], so it feels really weird when that doesn’t happen.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

5.10.2. How It Works

Peter Carruthers thinks that you get this effect because language is essential for conjoining information from different modules. Specifically he thinks that it is needed at the interface between beliefs, desires, and planning. Combining across modalities is possible without language for simple actions (see the other crossmodal hacks [Hack #57] through [Hack #59] in this book for examples), but there’s something about planning, and that includes reorientation, that requires language.

This would explain why people sometimes begin to talk to themselvesto instruct themselves out loudduring especially difficult tasks. Children use self-instruction as a normal part of their development to help them carry out things they find difficult.7 Telling them to keep quiet is unfair and probably makes it harder for them to finish what they are doing.

If Carruthers is right, it means two things. First, if you are asking people to engage in goal-oriented reasoning, particularly if it uses information of different sorts, you shouldn’t ask them to do something else that is verbal, either listening or speaking.

I’ve just realized that this could be another [Hack #54] part of the reason people can drive with the radio on but need to turn it off as soon as they don’t know where they are going and need to think about which direction to take. It also explains why you should keep quiet when the driver is trying to figure out where to go next.

T.S.

Second, if you do want to get people to do complex multisequence tasks, they might find it easier if the tasks can be done using only one kind of information, so that language isn’t required to combine across modules.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

Blocking Neurotransmitters

There may be ways to either block the formation or increase the destruction of other naturally occurring toxic chemicals and neurotransmitters, which include nitric oxide, n-methyl-d-aspartate (NMDA), and glutamate. Studies with glutamate antagonists have been unsuccessful in clinical trials of patients with dementia, and fiddling with NMDA receptor function can be dangerous because of the risk of seizures.
Read More …

Hack 65. Why Can’t You Tickle Yourself?

Experiments with tickling provide hints as to how the brain registers self-generated and externally generated sensations.

Most of us can identify a ticklish area on our body that, when touched by someone else, makes us laugh. Even chimpanzees, when tickled under their arms, respond with a sound equivalent to laughter; rats, too, squeal with pleasure when tickled. Tickling is a curious phenomenon, a sensation we surrender to almost like a reflex. Francis Bacon in 1677 commented that “[when tickled] men even in a grieved state of mind . . . cannot sometimes forebear laughing.” It can generate both pleasure and pain: a person being tickled might simultaneously laugh hysterically and writhe in agony. Indeed, in Roman times, continuous tickling of the feet was used as a method of torture. Charles Darwin, however, theorized that tickling is an important part of social and sexual bonding. He also noted that for tickling to be effective in making us laugh, the person doing the tickling should be someone we are familiar with, but that there should also be an element of unpredictability.

As psychoanalyst Adam Phillips commented, tickling “cannot be reproduced in the absence of another.” So, for tickling to induce its effect, there needs to be both a tickler and a ticklee. Here are a couple of experiments to try in the privacy of your own homeyou’ll need a friend, however, to play along.

6.5.1. Tickle Predicting
First, you can look at why there’s a difference between being tickled by yourself and by someone else.

6.5.1.1 In action
Try tickling yourself on the palm of your hand and notice how it feels. It might feel a little ticklish. Now, ask a friend to tickle you in the same place and note the difference. This time, it tickles much more.

6.5.1.2 How it works
When you experience a sensation or generate an action, how do you know whether it was you or someone else who caused it? After all, there is no special signal from the skin receptors to tell you that it was generated by you or by something in the environment. The sensors in your arm cannot tell who’s stimulating them. The brain solves this problem using a prediction system called a forward model. The brain’s motor system makes predictions about the consequences of a movement and uses the predictions to label sensations as self-produced or externally produced.

Taken from : Mind Hacks

Transplantation

A more direct human application is transplantation, which has been tried with dopamine-producing cells in Parkinson’s patients who suffer from dopamine deficiency. In the early work, human fetal cells that produced dopamine were transplanted, because such cells are more likely to retain the capacity to reproduce than adult cells. Later, the abortion controversy led to a U.S. ban on the use of fetal tissue in medical research or procedures. This political detour submerged the revolutionary impact of the finding that cells from outside the body can actually survive and reproduce after being placed inside the brain. A Mexican neurosurgeon reported the initial successful transplants in Parkinson’s disease, but Scandinavian and American doctors could not replicate the results, and the jury is still out on this issue. But note that
long-term follow-up of these transplanted Parkinson’s patients has revealed a disturbing side effect: involuntary jerks and movements caused by the transplanted dopamine cells continuing to reproduce,
because the normal regulatory mechanisms that suppress their action within the brain don’t work well on transplanted cells.
Read More …

Hack 64. Mold Your Body Schema (3)

These disorders suggest that the brain’s system for representing body schema can operate (and be damaged) independently from the sensory feedback provided by the body itself. Sensory feedback must play a role of course, and it seems that it is used to update and correct the model to keep it in check with reality. In some situations, like the ones in the previous exercises, one type of sensory feedback can become out of sync with the others, leading to the experience of mild confusion of the body schema.

Ramachandran and Rogers-Ramachandran applied an understanding of the relationship between sensory feedback and the body schema to create a novel method to help people with phantom-limb pain.2 They used a mirror to allow people who were experiencing a phantom limb to simulate visual experience of their amputated hand. In the same way as the earlier exercise, the image of their amputated hand was simply a reflection of their remaining hand, but this simulated feedback provided enough information to the brain so they felt as if they could control and move their phantom limb. In some cases, they were able to “move” their limb out of positions that had been causing them real pain.

An fMRI [Hack #4] study by Donna Lloyd and colleagues3 might explain why visual feedback of body position might have such a dramatic effect. They scanned people while they were receiving tactile stimulation to the right hand, either while they had their eyes closed or while they were looking directly at their hand. When participants had the opportunity to view where they were being stimulated, activation shifted dramatically, not only to the parietal area, known to be involved in representing the body schema, but also to the premotor area, a part of the brain involved in planning and executing movements. This may also explain why the earlier exercises confuse our body schema enough to make accurate movement seem difficult or feel unusual. Visual information from viewing our body seems to activate brain areas involved in planning our next move.

6.4.3. End Notes
Ramachandran, V. S., & Blakeslee, S. (1998). Phantoms in the Brain: Human Nature and the Architecture of the Mind. London: Fourth Estate.

Ramachandran, V. S., & Rogers-Ramachandran, D. (1996). Synaesthesia in phantom limbs induced with mirrors. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B. Biological sciences, 263(1369), 377-386.

Lloyd, D. M., Shore, D. I., Spence, C., & Calvert, G. A. (2002). Multisensory representation of limb position in human premotor cortex. Nature Neuroscience, 6(1), 17-18.

6.4.4. See Also
Tool use extends the body schema with its reach, altering the map the brain keeps of our own body: Maravita, A., & Iriki, A. (2004). Tools for the body (schema). Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8(2), 79-86.

Vaughan Bell

Taken from : Mind Hacks

Hack 63. Keep Hold of Yourself

How do we keep the sensations on our skin up to date as we move our bodies around in space?

When an insect lands on your skin, receptors in that area of skin fire and a signal travels up to your brain. The identity of the receptor indicates which part of your skin has been touched. But how do you know exactly where that bit of your body is so you can swat the fly? As we move our bodies around in space we have to remap and take account of our changes in posture to understand the sensations arriving at our skin; very different movements are required to scratch your knee depending on whether you’re sitting down or standing up. This might seem like a trivial problem, but it is more complex than it seems at first. We have to integrate information from our joints and muscles about the current position of our bodyproprioceptive informationas well as touch and vision, for example, to gauge that the sight of a fly landing and the sensation of it contacting your finger are coming from the same place.

6.3.1. In Action
Try closing your eyes and feeling an object on a table in front of you with the fingers of both hands. Now, cross your hands and return your fingers to the object. Despite swapping the point of contact between your two hands, you do not feel that the object has flipped around. The next two illusions attempt to make this remapping fail.

First, try crossing your index finger and middle finger and run the gap between them along the ridge and around the tip of your nose (make sure you do this quite slowly). You will probably feel as if you have two noses. This is because your brain has failed to take account of the fact that you have crossed your fingers. Notice that you are unable to overcome this illusion even if you consciously try to do so. This is sometimes called Aristotle’s Illusion, as he was apparently the first person to record it.

Taken from : Mind Hacks